


he was a friend of mine

by redbatman



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Canon Divergent, Canon Temporary Character Death, Episode: s08e17 Goodbye Stranger, Episode: s09e23 Do You Believe in Miracles?, Grieving Castiel, M/M, Mutually Unrequited, POV Castiel, Season/Series 10, dont know how to tag this but this was based on one particular scene in brokeback mountain, just so you know this is sad. there is no happiness leverage here., thats for other times and other stories, this is technically also demon dean but its implied and not about that so i wont tag it, which haunts me every day of my life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-31
Updated: 2018-05-31
Packaged: 2019-05-16 09:01:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14808296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redbatman/pseuds/redbatman
Summary: Dean is dead now and he won’t return any of Castiel’s phone calls.He’s been staying in Dean’s room, sleeping in his bed, haunting the space. He twists up the sheets and leaves a new shape in the mattress like a poltergeist making itself comfortable.He touches Dean’s possessions, moves them around the room. He reads his books, finding all the places where Dean left notes in the margins, all the creases left behind from past dog ears marking past places. Cas leaves some dog ears of his own, and he can’t stop tracing his fingers over the passages Dean has underlined, words he has circled.Did you think about this?he talks to Dean so much these days. Or if you’d rather, more accurately, he talks to himself all the time lately. He thinks to himself.In the darkest, emptiest, most hopeless moments of your life, did these words ever come to you like a beacon from a lighthouse. Did they help you keep from crashing on the rocks?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> i had this idea LAST summer and I wrote some of the first chapter then and I came back to it almost a year later, edited it and finished it. so now it's here for better or for worse because jesus christ I can't have it sitting on my chest like a sleep paralysis demon any longer.
> 
> title is from he was a friend of mine by bob dylan.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As they progressed, he wondered if the new versions remembered what he had done to the old, discarded models, somewhere inside their artificial hearts. He wonders now if they slowly started to recognize him as their predator, in the way that rabbits know to hide from shadows circling in the sky above them. It’s more likely that Naomi simply set them in a pattern; impersonal, purely mathematical, logical, orderly, to play out a sequence of reactions, a sequence of potential realities.
> 
> Though there was nothing that had felt _impersonal_ about the things Dean said to him.

_We didn’t part friends, Dean._

_So what?_

* * *

 

Castiel will not punish Dean. He will not strike him down. Everyone knows that. All of them know, in every place between the sky and earth and everything below. It’s impossible to be a commander with such a glaring weakness. His love is like a target painted neon and corrosive on his heart saying _this is the shot that will never ever fail you. You will never miss this bullseye._

Naomi trained him more than any other angel. Trained him _personally._ Fuck, it had certainly felt _personal_ , cracking his mind open, flaying his memories. Naomi might have her own vendetta here, might resent him for being so incredibly, chronically inept at bending to the will of Heaven but he couldn't deny the practicality of her plan. Dean was notoriously hard to kill. Dean had not followed orders, had knocked the whole game off the table and what was worse is he'd pulled Cas down with him. As if he would let any other angel kill him. As if anyone else could get so close. Sometimes, Cas allows himself to believe that Dean must love him.  

He remembers it, every single time he killed Dean. Dean doesn't talk about this, doesn't ask. Cas doesn't tell him. Neither whispered a word about it from the moment that Castiel laid a hand on his face to heal, keenly aware of the way Dean flinched away from him in anticipation of more pain. Dean has no idea. If Castiel has his way, he never will.

Each kill was different in a new and horrifying way. Initially they all begged, asked for mercy. Some of them grabbed onto his coat like they were holding onto the part of him that used to be a creature they could trust. Like they could hold it in and keep it inside him, make him good, keep him from cracking the surface of everything he brushes.

They said so many pretty things before he punched them to the dirt and they stopped saying anything at all, pretty or otherwise. They begged him, swore on past oaths, on friendship. He slashed their throats and watched human blood, not inhuman shiny grace, pool from the wound as they collapsed to the ground, green eyes dead and unseeing.

As they progressed, he wondered if the new versions remembered what he had done to the old, discarded models, somewhere inside their artificial hearts. He wonders now if they slowly started to recognize him as their predator, in the way that rabbits know to hide from shadows circling in the sky above them. It’s more likely that Naomi simply set them in a pattern; impersonal, purely mathematical, logical, orderly, to play out a sequence of reactions, a sequence of potential realities.

Though there was nothing that had felt _impersonal_ about the things Dean said to him.

He cornered one in an alley and grabbed him by the front of his shirt, pulling him deliberately onto his waiting angel blade. The poor thing sputtered, clockwork key toy soldier heartbeat pounding. Wasted his last gasping breaths begging. “I love you. Please. I love you.”

Another one was resigned, smiled at him all tired and sad. “You can hurt me but don’t hurt anyone else, okay?” He stopped running. Stood there. Waited.

Castiel got angry at that one. He stabbed him through the eye.

There were ones who tried to reassure _him._ A Dean that cradled his face in his hands as they stood there in a grotesque parody of a romantic embrace. Castiel holding the back of his head, dipping him backwards with the blade slid smooth and easy into his stomach like a hot knife through butter. He bled out and whispered pathetic, meaningless platitudes as the light of his life flickered dimmer.

“It’s okay,” he said. “You'll be okay.”

He died and Castiel threw the body to the ground in disgust.

There were the ones who screamed at him, called him horrible names. The ones who screamed for help, for Sam, for their mother.

There was the one who grabbed him by the tie and kissed him like violence, like a punch to the teeth, before personally pointing his sword and guiding his hand.

Of course, there were the ones who cursed God, cursed Heaven, cursed him. Wished they had been left in Hell, because, one viciously snarled “At least I’d never have met _you_.”

Castiel easily laid him out in the dirt after that. It wasn’t out of anger, oh no. After all, who in Heaven cared about the wounded feelings of a screwed up little boy? It was all about efficiency at this point. Taking simple toys apart, yanking out their clockwork motors and watching their wind-up feet stutter, slow then stop and run no more, silencing the sound of their fragile springs and gears.

By the end it was just a matter of prey drive. He stalked Dean in the warehouse like an animal. He stalked him like they were both animals and the only thing in their lives that propelled them to step forward was the knowledge that one was to kill, and the other was to be killed. There was no possible chance of Dean overpowering him. Castiel’s only reaction to his feeble attempts to run, to hide, to defend himself was an overwhelming sense of disgust, accompanied by a surge of annihilating pity, like the sense of looking at a pathetic suffering thing and wanting to destroy it. To put it out of its misery. 

Dean raised his arm and his gun was struck down. Castiel struck him down. “No, Cas,” back to begging again. Interesting. “No!” he raised his hand weakly as if he could somehow hold Castiel back.

He was still calling him _Cas,_ that overly familiar name, as if he had the right. As if they had any claim to each other. That was the only thing that every single one of them had done.

Castiel broke his wrist without hesitation and Dean gasped in shock at the sickening _crack,_ his arm bending at an unnatural angle as he recoiled back from the pain. He couldn’t scramble away. “No, Cas,” he begged as Castiel raised his sword. “Don’t. Please,” it was over. “ _Pl-_ ” Dean’s last word was cut off when he stuck the blade in his chest. He choked, spluttered. And that was all there was.

Castiel viciously yanked the weapon from his chest and Dean didn’t say _please_ anymore.

He stood there in silence as the lights came on.

Her heels clicked across the floor as she made her way to his side. “No hesitation,” she observed, sounding proud. “Quick. Brutal,” the body was lying at their feet and she looked at it with calculated detachment. Cas stared at it with an empty expression.

“Everything’s back in order,” she smiled at him. “Finally. You’re ready.”

 

* * *

 

_I won’t hurt Dean._

_Yes, you will. You are._

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> never posted something with chapters so thats wild.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean suffers on Earth; Dean goes to Hell. Castiel saves Dean from Hell; Dean suffers on Earth. Dean dies on Earth; Dean goes back to Hell. Cas saved him, and then he could no longer save him, and the cycle is over, and the cycle is ended, and the doors have rusted shut on their hinges, and the windows are sealed shut with paint, and the sun rises, and the moon rises also, and no one left alive still cares that anyone ever tried to live in that house, ever tried to make a go of it, the two of us together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'd be amazed i passed up the chance to describe dean getting murdered by metatron if i didnt know that tragically cas did not witness that. and i did commit to his pov.

_And the Angel tablet – arguably the most powerful instrument in the history of the universe – is in pieces, and for what again? Oh that’s right. To save Dean Winchester. That was your goal, right? I mean, you draped yourself in the flag of heaven, but ultimately it was all about saving one human, right?_

_Well, guess what. He’s dead, too._

* * *

 

Dean is dead now and he won’t return any of Castiel’s phone calls.

He’s been staying in Dean’s room, sleeping in his bed, haunting the space. He twists up the sheets and leaves a new shape in the mattress like a poltergeist making itself comfortable.

He touches Dean’s possessions, moves them around the room. He reads his books, finding all the places where Dean left notes in the margins, all the creases left behind from past dog ears marking past places. Cas leaves some dog ears of his own, and he can’t stop tracing his fingers over the passages Dean has underlined, words he has circled. _Did you think about this?_ he talks to Dean so much these days. Or if you’d rather, more accurately, he talks to himself all the time lately. He thinks to himself. _In the darkest, emptiest, most hopeless moments of your life, did these words ever come to you like a beacon from a lighthouse. Did they help you keep from crashing on the rocks?_

 _People aren’t supposed to look back,_ the book said. _I’m certainly not going to do it anymore._

Cas isn’t even talking to himself, not really. All he’s doing is _thinking_ , which is infinitely worse than talking. Sam is not here. He’s out. He’s been out for a while now, looking for his dead brother. Sam’s dead brother, as it turns out, is a real hard man to track down, a real slippery customer. Maybe Sam’s dead brother doesn’t really want to be found.

_One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters._

Maybe, just maybe, Sam’s dead brother likes being dead.

_I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren’t going to want to go on living._

The other day, Cas accidentally dropped one of the records on the ground and scratched the vinyl. Ever since then, he’s fantasized about Sam’s dead brother coming home and being pissed as fuck about it. He closes his eyes and imagines Sam’s dead brother pouting and demanding to know, rhetorically of course, if Cas knows just how hard it was to _get_ that record, how long he’s had it for. He wants Sam’s dead brother to clench his jaw and scowl over a skip in an old song. He wants a fucking record scratch to be all that he’s responsible for, all that he has to live with.

He wants he wants he wants. Who gives a fuck what he wants? _Cas wants, he wants, he wants_ is every single one of the reasons why Dean is _Sam’s dead brother_.

_The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. When any Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments._

It might be that Dean would rather be dead than see Cas. It could be. Could be why he hasn’t answered any of the calls he’s made, all saying, in summary that _you don’t have to be dead._ Maybe he’s just giving Cas a taste of his own medicine, for all those times he’s left prayers unanswered. Dean was always the one calling and now that he’s dead, he’s the one who won’t answer.

Or maybe this is it. Perhaps this is just all there is, and there is nowhere more they can go.

_Just before the nobody died, the heavens opened up, and there was thunder and lightning. The voice of God came crashing down. He told the people that he was adopting the bum as his son, giving him the full powers and privileges of The Son of the Creator of the Universe throughout all eternity. God said this: From this moment on, He will punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who has no connections._

Dean suffers on Earth; Dean goes to Hell. Castiel saves Dean from Hell; Dean suffers on Earth. Dean dies on Earth; Dean goes back to Hell. Cas saved him, and then he could no longer save him, and the cycle is over, and the cycle is ended, and the doors have rusted shut on their hinges, and the windows are sealed shut with paint, and the sun rises, and the moon rises also, and no one left alive still cares that anyone ever tried to live in that house, ever tried to make a go of it, the two of us together.

_And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes._

The one space in Dean’s room Castiel has barely touched is his dresser. It’s irrational, but it seems almost breathlessly intimate, to rummage through his drawers or open them wide to rifle through his shirts. Dean died in a shirt. But then of course, most people die in a shirt, one way or another. What’s more important, probably what is most important, is how he lived in these shirts.

_He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next_

Cas is tired of wrapping his legs in Dean’s bedsheets and getting fingerprints on his photo frames. So today, he opens the dresser.

The first thing he thinks is that the clothes still smell like Dean. So he starts pulling them out and bringing items intermittently to his face in a pastiche of kissing. He wonders what Dean is wearing now that he’s dead. He wonders what he smells like.

In the bottom drawer, at the very very back, at the very very end, Cas finds the coat he died in, wrapped around the shirt Dean wore to watch him die. Dean has slid his arms into Castiel’s sleeves. It’s crushingly tender. Removing them from each other would be an act of tearing.

“If you remember,” Dean had said back then. “Then you know you did the best you could at the time.”

He paused. “Guess you need to get yourself a new coat.”

_He had supposed for years that he had no secrets from himself. Here was proof that he had a great big secret somewhere inside, and he could not imagine what it was._

Today, now, here, Castiel cries on the floor of Sam’s dead brother’s bedroom. There it is, the walls seem to say. Love and silence and nothing else.

 

* * *

_I deserved to die. Now, I can’t possibly fix it. So why did I even walk out of that river?_

_Maybe to fix it._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ok if you've seen brokeback mountain i'm sure you know what scene this was about. 
> 
> the book quotations were from slaughterhouse five, a book i read once and that dean Allegedly likes a whole lot, which is actually pretty upsetting and sort of meta given, you know, everything about slaughterhouse five and what its about.
> 
> i'm gaydean on tumblr as per Usual. i'm very tired now. man, the tonal shift between this and my last one huh?


End file.
